DESCRIPTION(provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research training program is to prepare trainees for a successful academic research career by providing expert and comprehensive mentoring in laboratory or clinical research pertinent to kidney disease. The program proposed in this application has the faculty expertise, infrastructure, and research opportunities to provide outstanding training. The training program is organized into five thematic administrative units designed to provide greater interdisciplinary collaboration, adminstrative cohesiveness, and enhance research opportunities for trainees: the Core Nephrology Unit; the Diabetes, Human Genetics, and Gene Therapy Unit; the Glomerulonephritis and Renal Immunology Unit; the Stem Cell and Developmental Biology Unit; and the Clinical Research Training Unit. The program has thirty training mentors from different basic and clinical departments; the number of faculty has been increased substantially to provide a greater scope, depth and opportunities for interdisciplinary research in the basic sciences to accommodate the increasingly complex and technologic nature of research and the need to have greater participation of the basic sciences in the training of M.D. basic science investigators in nephrology. The research encompassed by the training program is highly pertinent to normal renal physiology and kidney disease. It includes the physiology, molecular biology and cell biology of tubular epithelial cells ion transport, the biochemistry of signaling pathways in kidney epithelia, the cell biology of the calcium receptor and other G-protein coupled receptors in renal epithelia, the early gene response to oxidative renal injury, the biochemical basis of renal tubular injury, and the cell biology and biochemistry of vascular endothelium. The training program also broadly encompasses the immunology, genetics, glomerular inflammation, and epithelial stem cell differentiation. Trainees will have full access to the entire graduate school curriculum, The clinical investigation program includes offering trainees the opportunity to apply for and enroll in the K30 APPCI program, which provides rigorous training in clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, outcomes research, study resign and a mentored clinical research program. Trainees are required to participate in a weekly formal research conference as well as weekly research-in-progress conferences in which both trainees and mentors responsible for supervision of research present their research.